"This book is a history of how the political influence of the very wealthy and corporations in the postwar era. The historian David Gibbs locates this influence it in the rightward shift in US politics in the 1970s, driven by business groups and the wealthy elite. After the realignment of the Republican party in the 1960s, driven mostly by racial appeals to white Southern Democrats, the historian David Gibbs argues that business and conservative elites emphasized crises like inflation and security threats from the Soviet Union as pretexts to sell a conservative policy transformation to the public. Business interests ran campaigns that reduced living standards and compromised economic security for the majority while advancing the interests of the already wealthy. Wealth and resources were redistributed upward. The stable growth rates associated with the postwar era came to an end with the 1973 recession, the worst downturn to date. The even more severe recession that followed in 1980 and continued well into the Reagan presidency coincided with deindustrialization, whereby whole categories of high-paying blue-collar jobs were permanently eliminated or outsourced overseas. The postwar economic security was gone, and inflation, which began during the late 1960s and gradually accelerated, reached double digits by the end of the 1970s. The inflationary spurt was exacerbated by massive worldwide increases in oil prices, orchestrated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The combination of persistent unemployment and inflation-"stagflation"-defied traditional fiscal and monetary remedies, which were no longer effective. And the Cold War brought a new crisis of foreign policy and the fear of resurgent Soviet aggression. The effects of this shift were considerable. By the end of the decade, public policy emphasized reduced spending on social programs, deregulation of multiple economic sectors, and an unprecedented willingness to tolerate high unemployment, and a foreign policy that emphasized military spending and use of force, often at the expense of a wide social safety net"--